Trouble in Newspaperland
Stop the Presses: Editor Blames Problems on Marketing Dept.
By Jonathan Weber, 7-22-05
The editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, resigned this week amid a flood of hosannahs about what a great job he's done in rebuilding that great newspaper. I take a special interest in the Times because I worked there from 1989 to 1997, and I certainly agree that Carroll deserves credit for restoring the paper's integrity and spirit in the five years that he's run the place.Yet today's interview with Carroll in the Columbia Journalism Review illustrates quite starkly one of the core problems in big-time newspaper journalism: its practitioners confuse their own interests, and their own measures of excellence, with those of their readers. In particular, newspaper prizes, and specifically the Pulitzer Prizes, are used as the standard of journalistic success, but those prizes reflect not what readers think, but what other journalists think.
There's nothing wrong with being proud of the recognition of your peers. But consider this exchange from the beginning of the CJR inteview:
"Paul McLeary: One of the reasons the Los Angeles Times represents a puzzling -- even disturbing -- case study for the rest of us is the striking disparity between its journalistic performance (13 Pultizer prizes in five years) and its circulation performance (daily readership down 6.5 percent and Sunday readership down 7.9 percent in just the past 12 months) ...
John Carroll: I believe content had nothing to do with the circulation decline; if anything, the decline was mitigated by our content. Where does the blame lie? The list is long..."
Carroll goes on to say that plummeting readership is the fault of the business side of the paper, and accepts the interviewer's unreflective assumption that Pulitzer Prizes are proof of journalistic excellence.
Now personally, as an editor, I am always happy to blame all problems on the business side. That's practically part of the job description of an editor. If people aren't reading, that's because the circulation & marketing department is falling down! That damn do-not-call list - how can you expect us to maintain circulation if we can't relentlessly badger people? Cutbacks in the marketing budget - if people aren't subscribing, it's because we don't have enough billboards and TV ads!
Yet in almost any other business, if the product was not selling, one of things people would question is whether the product is meeting the needs of its audience. And even if you believe - as I do, at least most of the time - that journalism shouldn't be measured by the same bottom-line standards as shampoo, you'd think that someone in Carroll's shoes might allow that there could be something going on other than lack of telemarketing.
My personal experience at the Times - and granted, this was before Carroll's tenure - was that important parts of the paper, most notably the Washington bureau, were far more interested in stories that would impress their peers and sources inside the beltway than they were in things that might be closer to the concerns of their readers in Los Angeles. It was also the case that enormous resources went into winning prizes - just entering the damn contests was practically a full-time job.
The LA Times once aspired to be a grand newspaper of the West, but those ambitions were scrapped in the recession of 1990. I spent three years working in a cavernous San Francisco office that was intended to house a full-on Northern California edition but in the end had only a handful of correspondents. The paper's circulation is well below what it was when I was there, despite the continued dramatic growth of Southern California and the West.
Newspapers around the country are experiencing similar problems, and there may in fact be no solution to it. But if the most revered editors in the country don't even admit the possibility that readership issues might be related to the style, voice and subject matter of the paper, then we can be sure pretty sure the declines will continue. [End of article]
Very interesting piece. Having been an editor for almost seven years myself, I agree with this--one of the smart things that my former employer does is tie circulation to the editor's performance review. At first I was taken aback by this- how could I be held responsible for the job performance of some telemarketer in Charlotte, NC? Well, as it turned out, as the paper improved and we spent a lot of time on community outreach (in fact, this seemed to be my main job at the end) our circulation grew and grew and grew.
We didn't enter many contests. You;re right. It's a full time job and a tedious one, at that. So I don't have a lot of fancy awards on my resume. In fact, we used to joke about that in the newsroom. "This is for the pulitzer, people! Get to work!" but I do have the satisfaction of having stewarded a newspaper that readers like. After all, that's what it's all about...
You've gotta be careful with conflating two terms here: "readership" and "circulation." In these days of easy and often free Internet availability, total readership of actual stories can easily be increasing at a time when "circulation" is decreasing. Plummeting circulation, in other words, may not equate to plummeting readership. I, for one, am far more likely to read an LA Times story today. And plummeting circulation seems a logical result of free Internet circulation. Are we surprised that people are less likely to buy our product when we give it away for free?
Comment By Jonathan Weber, 7-22-05John, that's certainly a good point. And if John Carroll had said that, i.e. 'we don't think readership is declining, we have more readers than ever' I might not have written what I did. But that isn't what he said. And I still think that many journalists have not come to grips with the fact that winning prizes and winning readers are not the same thing.
Comment By Emily Esterson, 7-22-05Ahem.. John Fleck??? Where do I know that name from? Ah yes! Science writer at the Albuqeurque Journal. One of the few newspapers that makes you pay to read online.
Sorry John, I just couldn't resist.
The same! And an ardent, if sometimes uncomforable, defender of my employer's efforts to find a way to continue paying me in an environment in which people increasingly expect their news to be free.
Comment By TakeFive, 7-22-05Let’s see what John Carroll has provided to the Times readers. A couple that come to mind:
1. A extended and lurid hit piece on candidate Schwarzenegger intimating he’s a racist, cheated to gain his bodybuilding championship, engaged in drug use, group sex, interracial sex, is homophobic but also possibly gay, abuses steroids, ….
2.Extended follow up article about unsubstantiated abuses of women just before the election.
3.On the day of Gov. Schwarzenegger victory, allows Steve Lopez’s grossly offensive Gropenfuer column to run.
4.Allows Robert Scheer’s weekly droppings of effluvia on the Op/Ed pages. Although this one truly puzzles me. I suspect that Scheer is actually a piece of software that trolls the net for anti-Bush articles and auto-generates a weekly rant. The other explanation is that he is in fact a real person who has taken up residence at the Times since loosing his situation as Ted Kaczynski’s ghost writer.
John Carroll’s anti-Fox news, anti-blogger, pseudo-journalist screed clearly showed it was past time for him to be retired. It’s rather poignant that a guy reaches the summit of his profession and doesn’t recognize the fundamental restructuring taking place beneath him. What does that say about him as a newsman?
I truly want to be a subscriber again, but not until the LA Times ceases being the Democratic Party newsletter. Just do intelligent investigative journalism, ask the obvious follow up questions, get the facts strait, and loose the slant. Until then, my wallet stays closed.
You forgot the heart-tugging, prize-baiting series, Enrique's Journey. Never mind that the reporter sort of "re-created" the conversations. The recent boxing dad and daughter series is much in the same vein. In fact here's what the writer, Kurt Streeter said to NPR:
"KURT STREETER: Well, what we did was in reconstructing scenes where I was not on hand, but where I'd have at least two sources verifying that something happened in a particular scene or helping me reconstruct a scene, if I used a quote during that scene in the story, it appears in italics, instead of using quotation marks. That means then that the quotes, where you do see quotes, you can be assured that I was there and that I witnessed the people say what we're presenting in the paper."
So is Carroll's legacy at the Times the use of fiction in a news story?